"Early evidence suggests that competition in the new Affordable Care Act marketplaces is working.
Health insurance premiums in major cities around the country are barely rising.
"That’s the conclusion of two studies of data about newly public insurance rates. One, from the Kaiser Family Foundation, a health research group, looked at 49 cities and found that
prices for a popular type of plan are actually going down, on average. A second, from the actuarial firm Wakely Consulting Group, looked at the largest county in each of the 34 states with marketplaces run by the federal government and found an
average rate increase of zero.
"Decreases in the price of health insurance are basically unheard-of. The individual insurance market that these new marketplaces replaced experienced
annual increases of 10 percent in recent years. In the employer market, premiums went up by
a record-low rate of 3 percent this year, but even that increase can’t compare with what’s happening in many exchange markets.
“Usually, health insurance premiums have gone in one direction, and that is up,” said Cynthia Cox, a senior analyst at Kaiser who was a co-author on its paper. She said that the widespread premium decreases really stood out when she ran the numbers."
Hehehe...